Sotomayor book reading, signing

that’s how people often characterize Sonia Sotomayor, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who grew up poor in a Bronx neighborhood ravaged by drugs and crime.

She uses a different word to describe herself: “Stubborn.”

“It’s that refusal to give up,” she said in an interview with U-T San Diego. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always had it.”

She had it when she was diagnosed with diabetes at age 7. Her parents argued about giving her the daily insulin shot, so she taught herself how to do it.

She had it two years later when her alcoholic father died and her mourning mother sealed herself off in a bedroom for weeks of grief and silence.

“Enough!” Sotomayor screamed one day, pounding on her mother’s door. “What’s wrong with you? Papi died. Are you going to die, too?”

Over and over, she’s moved past an initial “fevered insecurity” to make things happen — rising above the “C” she received on her first midterm paper at Princeton to graduate with the university’s top academic prize; surviving the politically-charged vetting of her appointments to federal judgeships; quitting a daily three-and-a-half pack cigarette habit.

“That stubbornness — I wasn’t always admired for it,” she said. “My mother thought I was a living terror. But it was to a purpose. It was the engine that drove me.”

Interviews with Supreme Court justices are rare, but Sotomayor has a new book out, a memoir called “My Beloved World,” which is why she’s been making the media rounds: “60 Minutes,” The New York Times, “The Daily Show.”

The book offers little insight into the legal reasoning of the 58-year-old justice generally considered part of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing — and in interviews she won’t talk about specific cases or issues — but it is a candid, revealing look at a life of obstacles overcome and opportunities seized.

Sotomayor’s book tour brings her to the University of San Diego this afternoon for a reading and signing. The event is sold out, but it will be streamed live on the university’s website.

She said she’s coming to San Diego because she loves the city, which she got to know when she traveled to California often as a lawyer in private practice. She talked about Old Town, and the “beautiful architecture” here, and how San Diego as a border city “has an interesting, heavy Mexican influence with a very present American spirit.”

Self-reliance

When President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor — the first Hispanic and the third woman — to the Supreme Court in 2009, it took the Senate 10 weeks to confirm her, and during that time the arc of her story became well known.

She’s the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, raised in a neighborhood where she was told to use the elevators in buildings because the stairwells had muggers and drug addicts. She loved Nancy Drew books, acted out Three Stooges skits with her cousins and decided she wanted to be a lawyer after watching “Perry Mason” on TV.

Two Ivy League degrees. A stint with the DA’s office in Manhattan prosecuting accused murderers and child pornographers. An appointment to the federal court in New York before she was 40 and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

In nominating her for the Supreme Court, Obama called her life story the embodiment of the American Dream, and Sotomayor said she’s come to understand that she’s a role model, especially for young people.

“I get letters all of the time about it from kids asking me questions about how I did it, and how I overcame the obstacles in my life,” she said.

The memoir is her way of answering, she said, “because as much as I would like to meet every child who writes to me, I have only a finite number of free moments. As I like to say, ‘I do have a day job.’”

She writes about her cousin Nelson, her best friend growing up. According to her, he was the smarter of the two, but he got hooked on heroin and died of AIDS before he hit 30. She sometimes wonders why she was able to escape the dangers that consumed him.

She also writes about her failed marriage, a victim of her career demands and a lifelong “existential independence” that put distance between her and her husband, a high school sweetheart.

“It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn’t have survived,” she writes. “I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.”

It’s that self-reliance that draws some people to her story.

Kailyn Miller, a 17-year-old senior at La Jolla Country Day, is among 20 students from the school set to attend Sotomayor’s reading at USD this afternoon. She called it “an opportunity to see a justice who is amazing. I really admire her for how she has never let anything get in her way and just keeps pushing forward.”

Glass half-full

All the talk about adversity sometimes overshadows another source of her success, Sotomayor said — a deep well of optimism.

She doesn’t really know where that comes from, either.

“But I do know that being able to face life that way, to look for the good in everything, enables you to enjoy life more,” she said.

She told a story about one of her friends asking her recently what she thought of a particular event she had attended. “I started to express enthusiasm for it and she said, ‘For God’s sake, Sonia, there isn’t anything you don’t like.’” She laughed.

She’s also never been afraid to ask for help when she needs it, she said. And never afraid to walk away when she doesn’t.

When she was at Yale Law School, participating in a mock trial, she noticed that one of the jurors, a middle-aged man, didn’t seem to like her. Afterward, she asked him why. He said it wasn’t really anything she did. She pressed him some more and finally he admitted he just didn’t like “brassy” women.